Hotel de Dream (12 page)

The guest in the hotel dining room today was a middle-aged woman who resembled the mother of Marcus's ex-girl-friend. Marcus's ex-girl-friend, Moira, had left him three years ago after joining a feminist group at his instigation, and since then he had had no desire for a close relationship with a woman. He missed her all the same, when he lay on his narrow bed and contemplated the blank years ahead before the revolution, and on one occasion he had telephoned her from the staff paybox to say he wished she would come back to him. She had told him she would only do this when he was reconstructed, and he had rung off sadly, for women played little part in his idea of socialism. He had hoped to find Moira a perfect companion both for his revolutionary activities—she was strong and agile and could run with an illegal radio transmitter from a squat faster than the fuzz could catch her—and for his moments of leisure, when she would roll joints (which she provided with the money from secretarial work) in the flat she paid for and kept
clean. It hadn't worked out like that, Moira had begun to insist on shared housework, although she went on paying the rent without complaining for a time, and things had reached a point between them where she actually contradicted him on points of theory and looked sulky when he objected to this. Despite his bitterness at her change of heart, Marcus was disturbed at the close resemblance of the woman eating the fish he had served her: Moira's mother, unlike Moira, had agreed with his views on the most satisfactory role for her daughter, and once had come round to the flat and spent several hours trying to persuade her that she was lucky to have Marcus at all. He left the window and went with his waiter's walk over to the table. The woman was sitting gloomily in front of her empty plate and he saw she had even eaten the lettuce leaf, which was a rare thing for guests to do, counted on not to happen in fact, with the same leaf garnishing a succession of plates. He concluded she was not used to eating in restaurants, and looked at her more closely. The woman glanced up at him, but did not smile.

The guest looked almost like an intellectual, Marcus decided. She had taken no exercise since arriving that morning, but had been seen in the hall poring over the tide tables, as if information about the movement of the sea was more important and edifying than the sight of the sea itself. She wore thin shoes, and there was no sign (this reported by the chambermaid) of Wellington boots or plimsolls in her room. There were plenty of books there though (the chambermaid had not said which) and Marcus, stirred by memories of Moira and happy days with her and her mother in a cottage in the south of Devon, felt like asking her what she had come here for. He found himself wondering if she were by some long arm of chance a Trotskyist, but this seemed unlikely. He hovered by her chair, and said in a doleful voice:

“Would Madam care for a sweet?”

The woman turned, for Marcus was pointing at the sweet trolley, and considered for a moment the greying artificial cream on the trifle and the eruptions of chocolate on the tray beneath it. She shook her head.

“Coffee?”

“Please. Black.” Her voice was firm but breathy, encouraging to Marcus, who had heard only the soft hiss of refined talk since his arrival in the dining room of the White Horses at Frinton. He tried to imagine how to formulate his questions: nothing too direct, as this would not befit a waiter; not too servile, as she might be put off answering him except in the vaguest way. He remembered the low, rapid tone of the mutual criticism sessions of his past, and plunged into a question without further ado. The woman gazed at him, startled, as he said:

“If it might not be too impertinent to inquire, what are the motives for the visit?”

“My dear man!” The woman seemed quite amused. “D'you mean to say you've noticed nothing?”

Marcus's heart began to beat faster. It seemed impossible that things could be moving again in the world beyond his attic room. He had given up the stagnant society, with its Common Market preoccupations and obsession with inflation long ago, but it was true he had stopped reading
Le Monde
some months back and the woman might know something he didn't. He leered at her in his surprise, and as a response she waved an arm vigorously at the great curved window that lay before them.

“Do you know how long the tide has been out? It's increased!”

“The tide?” Marcus still smiled, but now with condescension. The woman was clearly a crank, and if he allowed her to talk his afternoon reciting on the Front would be gone. He made a surreptitious movement in the direction of the kitchens, the empty plate expertly balanced on his forearm and a napkin fluttering from his hand.

“It's been low tide for twenty-four hours now. I'm astonished you haven't noticed.” (The woman looked quite severe now, and no longer resembled Moira's mother.) “The manager here is most concerned about the phenomenon, I can assure you. Don't you ever look out of the window?”

Marcus went to the curved expanse of plate glass and stood there a moment. He recollected that yesterday he had particularly looked forward to his walk today because the water would be right up by 2 p.m. and the soothing sound of the waves helped him in his declamations. And there was no sign of it coming in! Its absence throughout the last revolution of the sun would account for the rubbish piled up on the beach. It seemed further away than ever, if possible. He began to believe the strange guest, and turned back to her, agitated. She must be a scientist, a marine biologist of some kind. She would be able to explain it all to him. He felt something exciting was about to happen, and it would be intolerable to be left out of it all, a seedy waiter on the top floor of the White Horses while the world went into apocalypse round him.

The woman's chair was empty. Even her scrumpled-up napkin on the floor by the chair looked frightening and significant. Marcus ran to the service stairs and up into the reception hall. She was there, conferring with the manager; and he waited impatiently for the whispered conference to be over so that he could ask what the meaning of all this could be. But when she had finished speaking, she brushed past him and went through the swing doors out on to the windy promenade. She gazed at the receded sea through binoculars. Shivering with cold and anticipation Marcus stood at her side, his texts forgotten and a premonition of violent times to come running like electric current through his frame.

A gloomy evening settled in over the Westringham Hotel. Mr Poynter lay in bed waiting for the summons to Mrs Routledge's cold Wednesday supper; and from where he lay, framed by the cheap curtains at the window, the sky appeared thick and white, like a wad of cottonwool about to come down on him, blocking his ears and eyes and coming finally to his mouth and nostrils so that he would sleep forever under it. He was dozing, and as the sky gathered at the windowpane, made an ominous wall against the glass (as if Mr Poynter and his room had become detached from Earth and were floating, fragile, in an expanse of heavy cloud, soon to be permeated, absorbed, forgotten), he wandered half within the Westringham and half beneath the blue dome of his immortal City. Bright rosebuds and lawns as green as colour catalogues alternated with his bedroom furniture, the single armchair in its viscous cover, the cracked, tiny basin just to the right of his head when he sat up. A stately portico came and went beside the imitation walnut wardrobe, like a magic pillar of white fire. In the dusty corner by the door his soldiers sometimes stood, scarlet arms glowing and fading again by the golf club he had bought at Lost Property to impress Mrs Routledge before booking into the hotel. He saw the outer wall of the City where the narrow partition with Room 22, Miss Scranton's, should have been: castellated, clean slabs of Portland stone washed down twice a day; a tangle of barbed wire on top; the look-out boxes with their sweeping lights and a machine gun sticking out like the paw of a hunting dog at the undulating
countryside beyond. He inhaled, and smelt the hawthorn fragrance of his youth, the ripe blackberries that grew all the year round in the preserved landscape of this dream. Then the partition (no cornice, no picture rail even, no illusion to mask the fact that Mrs Routledge had carved two rooms out of one, and Miss Scranton lay embarrassingly the other side of two inches of hardboard and bobbly wallpaper) swam once more before Mr Poynter's eyes. He heard his name spoken, then it was cried. He sat up and stared anxiously at the flimsy barrier. Miss Scranton was calling him. She sobbed as she uttered his name. She seemed to expect no answer. She was evoking him. Mr Poynter's blood froze and he sat bolt upright, his eyes screwed shut in an effort to remember the events of the afternoon, to block out this terrifying and yet somehow gratifying sound.

The wedding had gone without a hitch. After the unpleasant visit to the dungeons, and an escape from Miss Scranton—who had been led away by Struthers with promises of fine clothes and a romantic meeting later with her hero—Poynter had bathed and changed in the most stately suite at HQ and made his way to the Residence and the waiting bride. He was in tails, which he recognised with a slight pang of guilt as being the same as those he had hired so many years ago for his first wedding to Mrs Poynter, and there was a large pink carnation in his buttonhole. This memory was a replay for Poynter, who had realised on waking that he should not have been so hasty to reach Mrs Houghton without first preparing himself as a groom: there had been no time for a crowd in wedding mood: and he hoped to avoid having to see Her Majesty the Queen, whose presence might spoil this important day. He had smiled, and waved graciously. Mrs Houghton was there in the gold and white gown when he arrived, and a select band of guests had assembled in the room he had never used with Mrs Poynter, although they had designed it together to remind themselves of their happy past—a kind of Giant Front Room, where the
piano and the aspidistras and the wireless they had listened to Churchill's speeches on were exactly duplicated but at least three times their original size. (He saw, on going into this room with Mrs Houghton, that she shrank from it rather, and he hissed a promise in her ear that she should have carte blanche to invite the most fashionable interior decorator in the City to do it up: it was hardly the place where Lady Kitty Carson could be repaid for her hospitality.) There were flowers everywhere, and the grateful Mr Poynter saw that his bride had had a hand in these—a harp made entirely of sweet peas and roses, gladioli forming arrangements of drawn swords on the vast brown walls, sweet little nosegays carried by the bridesmaids. Mrs Houghton herself held a bouquet of lilies, and was surrounded by a contingent of old Nannies and page boys dressed in tartan kilts. There were even a few dogs about—and at first Mr Poynter frowned at this, no dogs were allowed to foul his City—but his bride murmured that her cousins down from Scotland and up from Wiltshire could hardly be expected to leave their Labradors behind and Mr Poynter melted into consent. His heart was bursting with happiness. It was a real country wedding, he could see that—on the lawn outside a point-to-point was taking place, with more young cousins of Mrs Houghton's soaring over hurdles on their little black mounts, and a tent where tenant farmers and old retainers were drinking tea and champagne and eating egg sandwiches. He bent down awkwardly and patted one of the strange dogs, and laughed with the others when it snarled at him in return. A young reporter, cheeks ruddy from country living, eyes nervous and overawed by having to approach the Leader, came up to him and asked where they intended to honeymoon, and here Mrs Houghton broke in and said, “The Country, after all what could be nicer than that?” And Mr Poynter agreed, although he had never been outside the walls of his City. He wondered if the model villages and farms and ancient monuments, planned as they were to afford him the
best possible view from his balcony, might not be too close together if they were actually visited, so that there would be little privacy for a honeymoon couple, but Mrs Houghton seemed to be able to read his mind and reassured him on this point as well. “I've looked out there, darling, and there are the most divine walks. Not a soul for miles!” Although his heart sank slightly, for Mr Poynter had been brought up in a town and was afraid of cows, he gave his happy nod again. The music from the private chapel was calling them. Mrs Houghton looked demure and went to seek out an aged, kilted man who would “give her away”, her father being long dead, and Mr Poynter braced himself for the coming ceremony. The Front Room emptied as the guests went over the sward to the plain little church Mr Poynter had constructed there in the days of his frequent visits to the ghetto; the Swiss Bodyguard stood saluting by the door, and he went, head high, to wed the woman of his choice.

At this point in Mr Poynter's memory of the dream, the wailing from the next room grew louder and Miss Scranton's fist began to pound against the wall. Poynter opened his eyes and his mouth and shouted back.

“Will you stop that accursed noise please? It really is becoming impossible in here to concentrate at all!”

“But I need you! I'm at HQ, I was told to wait here!”

Miss Scranton sounded pathetic and desperate, and for a moment Mr Poynter struggled with his conscience. Perhaps he had allowed her to get away with the idea that he would reward her with his love after she had stopped the Amazons from bringing chaos and unrest to his City. But surely not? She must have seen, this morning at tea, how immediately drawn to Mrs Houghton he had been: there was no comparison between the two women whatever. In a last tenuous attempt at reality Mr Poynter reminded himself sternly that it was out of the question for Miss Scranton to be at his HQ. She was in Room 22 and that was all there was to it. But she sounded convinced enough; and it crossed his mind that if
she went on making this din Mrs Houghton might overhear and be cold to him at supper. He crept out of bed and went at an unusual speed to the thin greasy partition, put his cupped mouth up against the hard wallpaper so that the bobbles (it was thus designed to conceal cracks and bad workmanship beneath) pressed on his lips like popcorn.